Modern operating rooms for performing surgery have seen several advancements over the past two decades. In the late 20th century, state-of-the-art operating rooms included several electronic surgical instruments (i.e. electrosurgical units, insufflators, endoscopes, etc.). These instruments were separately operated by the surgeon and members of the surgical team. The industry improved upon this type of operating room by integrating the various instruments into a unified system. With this configuration, the surgeon and/or members of the team use a central controller (or surgical control unit) to control all of the instruments through a single interface (often a graphical-user interface). Generally speaking, these central control units were built using modified personal computers and the operating rooms using them are commonly referred to as “digital operating rooms”.
The establishment of the digital operating room paved the way for the voice controlled operating room. With this system, a member of the surgical team (usually the surgeon) wears a headset with a microphone. The surgeon issues spoken commands into the headset, these commands are sent to the central controller that controls the various instruments to perform desired tasks or make on-the-fly adjustments to operating parameters. The central controller operates software including a speech-to-text converter (i.e. speech recognition software) to interpret and execute the voice commands. Since computers often have difficulty interpreting spoken language, typical systems include audible confirmation feedback to the surgical team, notifying them that a command has been understood and executed by the controller. Since sterility is critically important in all surgical procedures, this touch-free control system represented a significant advancement.
The voice-controlled digital operating room was further improved by the introduction of the wireless voice-control headset. This gave the surgeon greater mobility and eliminated the microphone cable as a possible source of contamination or nuisance for the surgeon. Voice controlled digital operating rooms with wireless headsets represent the modern state-of-the-art in the field.
Although this type of system has worked well for the convenience and efficacy of the surgical team and the maintenance of sterility, it has introduced certain heretofore unknown safety issues. One such safety issue is the problem of surgeons issuing commands into wireless headsets and input devices that are mated with a nearby room's surgical control unit. In that situation, surgeons may attempt to control a surgical control unit present in the room they are occupying, only to inadvertently control another surgical control unit in a nearby room where an unrelated procedure is being performed. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that surgeons may repeat commands in a vain attempt to operate the surgical control unit in the room they are occupying. This can result in injury to the patient and surgical team and/or damage to the equipment in the nearby room.
Moreover, a surgical team must keep track of the headset and ensure that the surgeon is wearing it prior to the procedure. Although they are less intrusive and more convenient than prior systems, the wireless headsets are still a source of potential contamination and nuisance for the surgeon.
The problems associated with wireless headset microphones can be eliminated by replacing them with ambient microphones located inside the operating room that receive the surgeon's commands. By using ambient microphones, the wireless headset is eliminated as a potential source of contamination. Furthermore, issuing commands to the wrong operating room control unit is impossible. However, the use of ambient microphones introduces new problems. Ambient microphone voice control systems use similar speech recognition software as headset voice control systems. Headsets receive relatively “clean” speech input with a high signal-to-noise ratio as a result of being very near the source of the speech commands. However, this advantage is not present with ambient microphones and the software that interprets speech commands is poorly adapted to deal with the additional background noise, echoes, reverberation, and distortion present in the audio data gathered by ambient microphones.
The problems of poor sound reception and poor voice interpretation with ambient microphones are compounded by the fact that ambient microphones cannot determine where sounds originate. As a result, the ambient microphone cannot discriminate between sounds originating from equipment in the corner of an operating room and commands issued by the surgeon next to the operating table. Moreover, the ambient microphones cannot discriminate between speech originating from different individuals in the room. This can result in degraded speech recognition performance or even safety hazards if the control unit misinterprets and executes “commands” it receives from environmental noise or unrelated speech.
There remains a need in the art for an ambient microphone voice controlled surgical system that can restrict the locations from which voice commands are accepted and ignore interfering sounds from its operating environment.